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Mikael's Magnificent Mumblings

It’s inside!

The chip maker Intel (and later AMD) has been in trouble, via the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities, which apparently have been around a long time. Time to dig out that old Pentium stored away in your cellar! Oh wait.. there was some generation of Pentium with serious bug, wasn’t it? Bugs for citizens!

Intel (and AMD?) have also for years had unchangeable code in their chips that is able to perform all sorts of duties one might not want to have in one’s computer by default. It is called the Intel Management Engine, in short “ME”. FSF has a short description of the thingie and its problems. From the user/customers point of view, this might also be seen as a vulnerability.

A little irony is that Intel has built its brand by the “Intel Inside” slogan (and logo). I suppose every adult person have seen an Intel Inside sticker on a computer. It’s all fine and dandy to have an Intel chip or two in your computer, but it seems it is more than just a chip; maybe it is inside your activities. It does feel a bit itchy. I do have some crackpot “code” in me called M.E., although not from birth, and certainly not by design. I am not that conspiratory 😛 M.E. is an autoimmune disorder, and I must say I chuckle at the ME name of Intel’s computer within the computer. Anyone who was around in the 1990s probably also remember parodies of the campaign. I recall “Intel Inside, Idiot Outside”. But since I was a user of Macs (who had Motorola 68k and later IBM RISC processors) Intel was sort of in the Windoze camp, and of course an object for sectarian ridicule.

I wonder if anyone has copyrighted the slogan Firmly Implanted Firmware?

If Kafka had been a chip maker, he would have named it The Processor.

By reading this you have been caught by the Inscius Inside campaign.
Mwahahahahaha.